> A little illuminating here and there? Trying understanding change,
> emergence, identity, difference, possibility, contradiction, negation,
> development, etc. without dialectics. It's not only impossible, it's
> boring. (pick up most any academic journal) Anyway, the dialectic is
> just a way we humans make sense of the above, not some hallowed
> philosophical knowledge. Dialectics permeates what we know as 'common
> sense:' "there are two sides to every story," "half-truth," etc.
Somewhere on the Web there may be a good dissection of the many senses of "dialectic" in Hegel, Marx, and their respective epigones, but I don't have time to look for it now; I also don't have time to do a whole essay on the subject myself. But your list of topics: "change ... development" illustrates nicely why "dialectic" is really not a very helpful philosophical term unless one severely disambiguates it.
There are plenty of "non-dialectical" ways of understanding all of these things, and they are not all the same thing. That's the trouble with trumpeting the marvelous virtues of "the dialectic" -- it is used to mean so many things that it ends up meaning not much of anything.
Certainly the good old "thesis/antithesis/synthesis" formula is not very useful; most of what goes under the heading of "dialectic" even in Hegel and Marx doesn't fit that formula. "Emergence"? What precisely does that mean, to begin with? And does everyone with a theory of "emergent evolution," for example, fall under the classification "dialectic"? "Identity, difference, possibility" -- no way to deal with these concepts except "dialectically"? I don't think so. But without a precise definition of what one means by "dialectic," it's impossible to say.
Basically (without writing the whole essay I am begging off from), "dialectic" is a term that lots of Marxists use for incantations: just murmur the word, and you can condemn heretics in one breath.
Now and then, you can find Marx writing very illuminating passages in which he seems to use something that might be called "dialectic," and very often you can find equally or more illuminating passages that have nothing to do with "dialectic" -- just ordinary, straightforward thinking, but penetrating thinking. OTOH, lots of the most "dialectical" stuff in Marx, especially in his pre-Kapital writings, turns out to be just verbal juggling when you examine it carefully.
> Do we just need a simple, non-dialectical, empirical understanding of
> the world despite the (fact?) that, "all science would be superfluous
> if the outward appearances and essences of things directly coincided."
"Skim milk masquerades as cream." No doubt; but Gilbert and Sullivan hardly needed "dialectics" to discover that.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.